In the fifties, the United States went on an anticommunist and antigay witch-hunting spree. While Macarthyism's left and liberal victims are well-attested, its antigay dimensions have been neglected, until now. In David Johnson's book on the subject, we learn that these incidents marked the opening phases of organised lesbian and gay rights activism within the United States. For those who assumed that the US Republican Party was only hijacked by antigay extremists in the late seventies, this will be an eye-opener. Nor was it the alcoholic Wisconsin Irish Catholic Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy who was the chief culprit, as much as collusion launched against a burgeoning lesbian and gay subculture within Washington's civil service. When the US State Department's senior officials made throwaway comments about purges of 'sexual deviants,' the Republicans were quick to realise the potential of this scapegoating within rural and conservative working-class religious congressional districts as they approached another presidential election almost two decades out of federal power. During the thirties, young lesbians, gay men and straight women flocked to Washington for independence and some degree of upward mobility, especially from small country towns. With the purge unleashed, there was no rationale within 'national security' grounds for them, as they were largely based on half-truths about early Soviet sexual liberalism, which ended when Stalin recriminalised homosexuality, and the irrelevant Eulengenspiel Prussian sex scandal at the end of the nineteenth century. No actual evidence of lesbian or gay communist spying was ever found in the United States, but this wasn't enough to stop a spate of suicides and aborted careers, until an angry ex-federal astronomer, Frank Kameny, founded the Mattachine Society of Washington. It took the unprecedented step of picketing federal offices and won support from the American Civil Liberties Union. Even so, it took twenty years until the Mattachine Society won litigationvictories that ended these US antigay civil service purges. And in New Zealand? Johnson tells us that similar purges occurred in Australia, Britain and Canada, so is there a story yet to be told here? If so, what would it look like? If not, why didn't it happen? Lavendar Scare is available from Unity Books Wellington, $54.00 hardback Craig Young - 12th July 2006